Sexistential Crisis

{This story has been sitting in my queue, nearly finished, for four months.  I’m FINALLY pushing it out there!}

From February 2009:

Would you believe that the gays left me in charge of their cats AGAIN on their most recent trip out of town? I thought after the last incident they would have banned me from entering hearth and home in their absence.

I overestimated them.

Before I explain the prank itself,  I need to take a bit a detour in the story to round things out.  You see, the gays have this completely bizarre homemade poster in their bedroom called, “The Race to the Cock”.  It is comprised of various magazine cutouts of naked, fully erect men, on some sort of shoots and ladders type path… to the cock.  Perhaps the most disturbing element of this poster is that in the middle there are the faces of Sally Struthers and Rue McLanahan.  Honestly I don’t know how to explain it.  It’s just WEIRD and kindof looks like this:

(that diagram, btw, was so traumatic for me to actually sketch out,  that I think my computer may be trying to file a battered spouse suit with the SFPD)

//backstory complete

So there I found myself, taking care of the cats, Dotty and Rhubarb, and planning my next prank.  I knew they’d be expecting to come home and find something altered in the house, so I had to up the ante.

I enlisted my roommate extraordinaire, Arwen, who enthusiastically agreed to take some rather humorous photos of us in their bed and create a more feminine poster for them,  because CLEARLY we had to bring some balance into the penix-overload.

Now I do imagine you could speculate about what kinds of photos we took, but I can assure they were all (kindof) tasteful and left EVERYTHING to the imagination… because you know, gay men are positively terrified of a naked woman.  (Well there is one involving our heads cut out and replaced with monkey stickers with “monkey” Arwen pointing to her nipple.  But that’s the only bad one.  Really.)

And so with the help of Arwen’s gay, Mike, we got to work taking those pictures and left the apartment exactly as it appeared when we entered.  No sign of the prank to be found.

A couple days later, Derek and Lucius came back into town and called to take me out to dinner for all my troubles.  So off I went to meet them later that evening at their apartment.  From there we headed out to dinner a couple blocks away at Borobudur.

Once we got seated, Derek asked my for the keys.  I responded:

Crap!  Would you believe I’d forgotten the keys to the apartment at my house?  Fortunately I remembered to call Arwen on my way over and she’ll bring them along and meet us for dinner.

Of course little did he know that Arwen had actually come with me to their hood, and was crouched outside their apartment between two cars holding the giant posterboard of our nudie photos while she waited for the three of us to go to dinner.

Arwen met us for dinner and things proceeded exactly according to schedule.  We invited ourselves over for a nightcap and the reveal finally took place.

The reveal brought much hilarity and shock from both Derek and Lucius who then mentioned how disappointed they were when they’d arrived home from vacation and realized I did NOTHING unusual to their place (they’ve taken to tearing the house apart now that they know I like to play pranks on them when they’re away).  Little did they know that the poster was not the only thing we’d left behind for them…

Revisiting this story (May 2009):

It’s been nearly four months since we executed this prank and there have been a number of developments.

1. Back in March Derek was on a flight back from D.C. and opened up his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, to see a nudie photo of us come flying out from between the pages and into the lap of the elderly man sitting next to him.  Yeah, we made wallet sized photos and littered them through their books.

2.  About a month ago I received a call that they were “dusting” the inside cases of their DVD porn collection and happened to uncover another photo of us inside the celebrated film, “28 Gays Later”.

3. The poster we’d created has been moved from their bedroom into the closet, where Derek is forcing his gay brother to sleep for the 7 weeks that he’s visiting SF.  You heard me.  The gay brother is being forced back into the closet, with pictures of naked women, for 7 weeks.

It’s the gift that just on keeps giving.